What is inside hard disk?
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First disks had a simple design. They had one or more rotating platters and a moving arm with read/write heads attached to it - one head on each side of the platter. The arm could move and stop at the certain number of positions. When it stopped each head could read or write data on the underlying track. Every read or write had to be done in blocks of bytes, called sectors. Sectors were usually 512 bytes long and there were fixed number of sectors on each track.
The drives themself didn't have much electronics and had to be controlled by CPU for every single step. First CPU had to issue command to position the arm. Then it had to instruct the drive which head should perform read and from which sector. After that CPU waited until the desired sector was moving under the head and started data transfer. This design was relatively simple and inexpensive. But there were several disadvantages.
First of all, each Input/Output operation involved a lot of CPU attention and, also, the disk surface was used inefficiently. It was convenient for the programmers to have fixed number of sectors on each track, but it was a waste of space, because the longer outer tracks could hold much more data than the shorter inner ones. Later, when digital electronics became cheap, hardware engineers could resolve this problem.
When IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) disks came out they had a little processor on each drive. This helped to free up CPU time by implementing more sophisticated set of commands. The disk space was also used more efficiently. Engineers had placed more sectors on the outer tracks, but still provided software writers with a convenient "cubical" look of the disk by doing internal translation of CHS (cylinders, heads, sectors). For example my old 340M disk has only two platters = 4 heads (sides), but it reports 665 cylinders, 16 heads (sides), and 63 sectors. In reality it, probably, has more then 4*63 sectors on each outer track and a little less than 4*63 on the most inner tracks, but we could never know for sure.
With the IDE disks CPU only has to tell the CHS of the sector that it wants to read and drive's electronics will position the heads and call back the CPU when it is ready to start data transfer.
The newest drives have even simpler interface. Instead of addressing sectors by their CHS (cylinder, head, sector) address they use LBA (Logical Block Addressing) mode. In LBA mode a program has to tell only number of the sector from the beginning of the disk (all sectors on disk are numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, ... ). In addition to that new disks have internal buffers, where they can store many sectors. This can speed up disk access a lot, because they could read data in buffer using all four heads at the same time.
Virtually all modern operating systems use LBA addressing, but the CHS notation is still around. First of all, MS-DOS, which is almost 20 years old, uses only CHS. Also some programs, like Partition Magic, would not work if partitions do not start at the cylinder or side boundary. And finally, it is easier to talk about hundreeds of cylinders than about millions of sectors. Therefore we will be using CHS notation throughout this discussion.
There are several things that you have to know about CHS addressing. Suppose that we have a 340M disk with 665 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors per track. Then the legal values for cylinder numbers are 0..664, for head (side) numbers are 0..15, and for sector - 1..63.
The maximum allowable values for CHS addressing mode are 0..1023, 0..255, 1..63 for cylinders, heads, and sectors respectively. If you multiply these values you will see that the largest hard disk that could be addressed with CHS is 8G. Therefore, if your disk is 12G many programs will see only 8G, because they use CHS.
What is inside hard disk?
Linear Mode
